Rocky could dimly see the timbers studded with spikes and the long hinges of bronze. The servant, with a great key, unlocked the gate, which closed softly behind them.
The pole weighed heavily on Rocky's unaccustomed shoulder. There was a trick of timing the step to the swing of the bales, that, stumbling a little, he caught. He was to remember this—the little file of men and women gathered from the two ends of the earth and walking without a spoken sound down through a twisting, sunken Chinese road to the Yangtze. And sensing the gathering drama of his own life, brooding over it with slowly increasing nervous intensity, he found himself coming awake. If this kept on he would soon be excitedly beyond sleep. But it didn't matter. They were saving Hui Fei. Not a word of explanation had been offered; but it was coming clear. As for the rest of it, he asked himself how it could matter. The presence of Miss Carmichael, a dangerous girl, an adventuress—he was thinking quite youthfully about her—who might easily be capable of anything, who could in a moment destroy the hope that was the only foundation, thus far, of his new life, and perhaps would choose to destroy it—even this, he tried to tell himself, couldn't possibly matter. Over and over, stumbling and shuffling along, he told himself that; almost convinced himself that he believed it.
He was to remember most vividly of all the first glimpse, through a notch in the hills, of the river. The viceroy paused at that point, and turning back from the shining picture before him, where the moonlight silvered the unruffled surface of the water, toward the home of his ancestors over the hill, spoke in a low but again musical voice a few lines in which even the American youth could detect the elusive vowel rhymes of a Chinese poem. And he saw that Mr. Doane stood by with the slightly bowed head of one who attends a religious ceremony. It was a moving scene. But could he have understood the words the boy would have been puzzled. For the poem—the Surrendering of Po Chu-I. breathed resignation, humility, the negative philosophy so dear to Chinese tradition, but nothing of religion in the sense that he a Westerner, understood the word, nothing of mysticism or romantic illusion or childlike faith; rather a gentle recognition of the fact that life must go as it had come, unexplained, without tangible evidence of a personal hereafter; that, too, the individual is as nothing in the vast scheme of nature.
They were ferried out, shortly after this, to the great junk they had twice seen within the twenty-four hours, her smooth sides curving yellow in the moonlight, her decks now scraped and scrubbed clean, flowers blooming in porcelain pots about a charming gallery that extended high over the river astern. The crew, roused from slumber, came swarming out from under the low-spread mattings. The laopan stepped nimbly to his post amidships on the poop. The heavy tracking ropes were hauled aboard, and the craft swung slowly off down the current.
Doane, with a lantern, escorted his excellency and Hui Fei, and the whimpering little princess, to the rooms below; then returned and with the same impersonal courtesy conducted Miss Carmichael down the steps. But at the door he indicated she stopped short; wavered a moment, lightly, on the balls of her feet. Then she accepted the lantern from him, bit her lip, and let fall the curtain without replying to his suggestion that she had better sleep if she could.
Alone there, she held up the lantern. The floor had been lately scrubbed; but, even so, she made out a faint broad stain in the wood. And a bed of clean matting was spread where she had left a grisly heap.
For a time Dixie stood by the square small window, looking out over the shining river toward the dim northern bank with its hills that seemed to drift at a snail's pace off astern. Her quick mind had never been farther from sleep. Her thin hands felt through her blouse the twisted ropes of pearls that were wound about her waist. Her lips were pressed tightly together. These pearls represented a fortune beyond even Dixie's calculating dreams. To keep them successfully hidden during the days, perhaps weeks to come of floating down the river in close companionship with these two strong observant men, and a half crazy American boy, and clever Oriental women, would test her resourcefulness and her nerve. Though she felt, ever, now, no doubt of the latter....
The thing was tremendous. Now that the confusion of the day and night were over with, she found a thrill in considering the problem, while her sensitive fingers pressed and pressed again the hard little globes. There were so many of them; such beauties, she knew, in form and size and color.... Never again would such an opportunity come to her. It was, precisely, if on the grandest scale imaginable, her sort of achievement. Tex was gone. The Kid was gone. No one could claim a share or a voice: it was all hers—wealth, power, even, perhaps, at the last, something near respectability. For money, enough of it, she knew, will accomplish even that. While on the other, hand, to fail now, might, would, spell a life of drab adventure along the coast, without even a goal, without a decent hope; with, always, the pitiless years gaining on her.
She searched, tiptoeing, about the room, lantern in hand, for a place to hide her treasure; then reconsidered. In some way she must keep the pearls about her person; though not, as now, looped around her waist. An accidental touch there might start the fateful questioning.
She put down the lantern; stood for a long time by the curtained door, listening. From up and down the passage came only the heavy breathing of exhausted folk. She slipped out cautiously; made her way to the sloping deck above—how vividly familiar it was!—tiptoed lightly aft, past the uncurious helmsman, around the huge coils of rope and the piled-up fenders of interwoven matting, out to the pleasant gallery where the flowers were.